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Top1. Introduction
Due to the many changes in the landscape of a society affected by a constant and, in some respects, intangible evolution, there are numerous professionals employed in the social field for which the need to periodically correct the course of work is a process inevitable as well as fundamental.
The role of the educator stands out among these, not in order of importance but for the centrality it plays in the issues we are about to explore.
Since the early 1970s (Fasan, 2019, p. 79), concomitantly with the spreading of training courses, the educator is called to acquire and make his own tools and skills to ensure that his work is able to rely on adequate methodologies, which can be used with the aim not to disregard the needs of the reference user.
“The impulses given by the cultural and social movements of the 60s and 70s helped to convey the idea that people with problems should not reside or attend total, closed institutions (asylums, special institutions for the handicapped or institutions for minors without families, orphanages) promoting a new mentality and culture of integration and access to rights and services open to all, including people whose problems or pathologies caused marginalization or exclusion” (Scarpa, 2018, p. 10).
Therefore, we are witnessing the disappearance of the rigidity of some pedagogical practices, instead of interventions aimed at compensating for the custodial nature of a system made obsolete by irreversible socio-cultural changes.
The strengths and weaknesses of the educational profession are therefore attributable to that sequence of transformations which, masterfully explained by the Polish sociologist and philosopher Zygmunt Bauman (2006) in the very close definition of “liquid society”, disorient the educator, on the one hand, and they push to a continuous search for new approaches, on the other hand.
The constant variable that accompanies the long journey of the educator, from the historical period in which the phenomenon of his renewal begins, up to the task that he is called to carry out in the context of contemporary reality, is the perennial search for a balance, where “flexibility, understood in this way, has had and still has a significant impact on people's biography, as it has translated and is translated into a dramatic existential precariousness” (Ferrante, 2017, p. 3).
As the basic cell and beating heart of a society in constant evolution, all the frailties resulting from the social metamorphosis that pervades our time coexist in the family; in the modern sense of the term, the family is the place where “we learn to be in relationship, and this process cannot take place except through an interpretation of values that involves a complex mediation with society” (Fadda, 2007, p. 8).
From a regulatory point of view, a clear signal of the awareness on the part of government institutions regarding the substantiality of conferring appropriate support to families, cores, among other things, distorted by a modernity that blurs the contours of a traditionalism imprinted for centuries in the collective imagination, is the framework law 328/2000.
Law 328/2000 (Framework law for the realization of the integrated system of social interventions and services) is the law for assistance, aimed at promoting social, welfare and socio-sanitary interventions that guarantee concrete help to people and families in difficulty (Tramma, 2005). The main purpose of the law is, in addition to the simple assistance of the individual, also the support of the person within their own family unit. The quality of life, the prevention, reduction and elimination of disabilities, personal and family hardship and the right to benefits are the objectives of Law 328/2000. For the first time, a national fund for social policies and interventions is also set up, aggregating and expanding the existing sectoral funding and allocating it to regional and local planning.
In conjunction with the aforementioned, the mission of the territorial social services is attended to by a significant change of intent, aimed at making these latter instruments the cornerstone of a renewed challenge: social leveling.
In line with the new national provisions, the sociologist Pierpaolo Donati's (2012) proposal regarding “Family mainstreaming” is placed, that is a strategy to support family policies aimed at countering the problem of demographic imbalances, through a functional and responsible use of structural European funds.